Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk.
The Kayako Engage edition may be deployed as a live chat system without ticketing at a reduced cost, featuring click-to-call and site visitor monitoring for customer targeting and engagement.
$29
per month
Zendesk Suite
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
The Zendesk Support suite is a cloud-based customer support software built for better customer relationships. Designed to improve customer satisfaction and to support customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media. The vendor states more than 200,000 companies such as Uber, Groupon, Box, Airbnb, and Slack are using Zendesk to lower their support costs, raise productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Zendesk offers a full suite of products to meet customer…
Kayako's interface is far less complex than Zendesk, so it looked like a good platform. Unfortunately, the features didn't work and their support team is the worst. I went back to Zendesk and I got everything to work including their chat function. Zendesk just works. You don't …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Kayako
Kayako beats the competition with the price but unfortunately loses the battle on all other fronts. Simply not enough options, not enough customisability, very nice and friendly customer support but not the most capable. If the code was less buggy it could be a stronger …
We used Kayako and it was pretty basic in terms of workflows and ticket management. It wasn't multichannel and it didn't have a mobile app. Ticket categorization wasn't as robust and effective, but it was easy to learn. JIRA is as robust as Zendesk, but it is also not easy to …
Zendesk offers an all-in-one solution and great analytics to analyze the ticketing in the company.
Zendesk seems to be more customizable than others and it seemed to be the best option for the price paid. It's secure and stable which is what we needed in the company.
When it works, It's without a doubt a great help desk solution. It is perfect for our usage, and have rolled it out company-wide. It's great if you have multiple departments. We have it set up so most items come through a single desk that then hands out tickets to their proper department. There may be cheaper options for smaller organizations but for one that is as service-driven as ours, we really think Kayako is a great fit.
Zendesk works best when you have end users reaching out to a dedicated team of support reps. Leveraging AI & Bots to help gain efficiency comes naturally to Zendesk. Teams that rely on dedicated support from an individual tend to struggle more, pushing against the theme of democratized support. Teams that do a lot of outbound communication generally find challenges with things like reporting on SLAs unless they are at the enterprise level. Works great for startups and non-profits alike!
Gives a very good report on an individual level of what is being done for a customer or corporate issue.
Easy to understand who has what, what the tickets are about, how long they have been opened and how many times the customer/employee have gone back and forth with each other.
Departments need a bit of work. Even though you can have multiple departments, the only changes that can be made are globally. If you want independent queues within the departments, you have to do a lot of work that can be very confusing.
Survey system is not up to speed. Kayako really needs to add Net Promoter Score into their system. Also, if a staff user removes their name from an incident ticket, it removes them from the survey so you really can't even get a good estimate of how well your staff is in the eyes of the customer.
Very difficult to implement when you already have a customer base. Setting them up in organizations is difficult. Also, the sign-up for new customers is quirky. If you send an email to Kayako, it will say you are not an authorized user, however, it will store your email address. If you try to send an email a second time, it will go through. This is one of many reasons why we decided to move from Kayako to Oracle Service Cloud.
We are grandfathered in on their old Software-assurance pricing and our continued use costs us only a few hundred dollars a year (excluding hosting expenses)
Our team's processes are now heavily ingrained in the system
We have not been shown a more compelling option that is more cost-effective while still offering all the features we've come to expect
Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.
ZenDesk Suite is very easy to use, it is intuitive and requires little formal training if you don't want it. It has taken years to get one of the main functionality that I want (initiate outbound text) and still is just promised in Q3 of this year. So seems kind of slow to respond to customers needs in this regard. Same with outbound calls from iOS, the first ticket requesting it is a couple years old and as far as I know there is nothing in the pipeline to bring this to life.
We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request
Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
Three years in we are about as happy with Kayako as we could be. We've had several employee's leave and on-boarding new hires was easier than it has ever been as things are uniform and consistent across the entire application.
I was very satisfied. They have a free trial for 30 days and I recommend you do that and use it. It is very easy to get started with the basics and the build on over time.
The only thing technically complex was single sign-on and integration to Salesforce.com required some tweaks – otherwise setting up system was very easy
We were using Spiceworks for a few years before switching to Kayako but found that it wasn't as customizable or as user friendly for our customers. The SNMP scanning and inventory features with Spiceworks was nice but we needed more of a Help Desk that would allow us to scale our services to more companies.
If spoken honestly Intercom is a level-par with any nearest competitor, Tools like Zendesk has to catchup with them in speed. However, there is an advantage to Zendesk with its simple and easy-to-get software which falls in every mid and small-size business pocket wherein Intercom is way too expensive and needs a tech admin to customize the product. The kick-starting feature with negligible configuration made Zendesk the ideal choice of our organization + the budget fell under our expenses.
Tickets were definitely responded to faster once we implemented the audible alarm that would go off when new tickets came into the queue. This was possible because of the API.
Since the system was email based we could set our monitoring software up to generate tickets automatically via email for customers when it found something out of the ordinary.
